


And The Pale Moon Is Rising

by Go0se



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Blood, Brief Vomiting, Entry 72, Gen, Magic-Users, Not A Fix-It, Snapshots, Unicorns, inspired by The Last Unicorn, this was originally subtitled 'Jay is not going to eff the unicorn', unicorns do not change into humans in the book unless under a spell but we are going to go with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-25 10:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3806962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The unicorn, the magician, the monster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And The Pale Moon Is Rising

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this a while ago, found it again recently.  
> 'The Last Unicorn' remains an excellent book and movie, and Jay Merrick remains a hapless detective who means well and gets into trouble.

  
**1.**  
  
Jay regretted getting there an hour early, but he hadn’t been able to sleep so there’d been no point in staying home. People stared at him as he walked down the hallway, the personally affronted stares of people who belonged somewhere looking at an outsider. He tried not to pay attention to it.  
Setting up the camera and mocked-up scripts in the interview room took his mind off it, a little, until he was done and had nothing to do except fidget with his hands.  
The whole place smelled like high school. That brought him back. Jay was older than he looked--- much, much older--- but it was still not a very pleasant sense-memory to have.  
After about twenty minutes he decided to kill some time juggling. He conjured a batch of Red Delicious apples and practiced couple basic tricks, circles above his head, two at once from hand to hand. Only fumbled a couple of them, which made him smile to himself a little. Fumbling a couple was better than dropping all of them within seconds like he used to. He was just getting into more complicated tricks with the third batch when someone cleared their throat loudly by the door.  
Jay startled; the apples flew all over the place, bounced once on the floor and then vanished.  
A guy stood in the doorway with a zippered binder in one hand and a cautious expression. “Hey, are you Jay?”  
  
“Yeah,” Jay replied automatically. Then reality clicked into place again: he was here to interview someone. Under false pretenses. The brief at-ease feeling practicing the tricks had given him faded away. “Uh, hey— you’re Tim right?”  
Tim Wright nodded and walked over to the desk where Jay was set up. “I didn't mean to surprise you, or whatever. You’re the one who called me,” he said as he sat down. “I figured you'd be waiting.”  
“Yeah, I know. It's fine. I’ve just been a-- little out of it lately.”  
Tim nodded. “Project deadlines?” He asked, somewhat sympathetically.  
“Yeah,” Jay lied as he scratched the corner of his eye. He paused, then rubbed at his eyes a little harder. Tim wasn’t quite in focus. “Excuse me—”  
Tim's shoulders sagged and he seemed to only barely keep himself from sighing. With exaggerated slowness he wiped his dark hair to the side of his forehead. An inch or so above the bridge of his nose was a slightly raised mark; not a scar or a bruise, deeper tan than the rest of his skin, and shaped like a flower bloom.  
Jay noticed Tim's middle finger and ring finger were the same lengths. That, and what Jay had mistaken for his eyes messing up was actually Tim shining very slightly, difficult to make out in the fluroescent light of the room. “Oh,” he said in surprise. “You’re a unicorn.”  
“Yeah,” Tim replied, raising his eyebrows sarcastically. He dropped his hand and the mark from his horn disappeared under his bangs. “Look, can we just focus on the script reading now?”  
Jay nodded hurriedly. He cleared his throat to try and shake off the lingering guilt at lying to this complete stranger. handing Tim the script he’d made up. “Sorry,” he added. “I just wasn’t expecting… uh. Anyway, you ready to do your screen test for this?”  
“I guess so. It’s been a while, you’ll have to catch me up to speed on everything.” **  
**  
  
*  
  
  
2.

In the cold, terrible moment just before it took him Jay could tell three things.  
One, great coils seethed around it invisibly, neither scaled nor feathered. The magic in Jay's blood let him see them, shadows of shadows: they were _endlessness_ and revulsion deep in his gut and sudden novas in his head. Malcontent rolled off it like a smell.  
Two, although it had no claws or scales Jay looked up at it and thought _dragon,_ dully as a bell tolling. It wasn't quite the truth because the truth was too wide. There are eternal serpents which clench the whole world in their scales, and there are beings of fire and iron muscle that lay in wait on mountaintops, and this thing was not them. It was something he didn't understand. _Dragon_ was the only word that came close.  
Three, this thing was worse than any dragon, because a dragon will rip you apart and then eat you and have done with it. This intended to keep him alive.  
  
He thought all that after he passed the camera to Tim over the fence, in the second when he felt a shift in the air and half-turned toward it instinctively. He was inhaling to scream when the moment passed, like lightning.  
The dragon took Jay to its lair and everything went dark.  
  
  
*  
  
  
**3.  
**   
Light woke him.  
Jay hadn't known he was asleep or gone but now he was _here_ and awake, and it was different from what he'd been before. Concrete dug into his back. His head was splitting open along its seams.  
There was a creature braced protectively above him, its back hooves planted on the other side of Jay's leg, facing toward the loud static-sound that Jay turns away from instinctively. A low buzz infused the air and ground around them. The creature was _burning_. Light pours off of it, especially the horn spiraling out from its forehead, like a sunbeam or the core of a nuclear reactor. Its breathing was heavy and unmistakeable in the cold.  
The unicorn made a sound like glass breaking as it reared and then planted its front hooves hard enough onto the dry cracked asphalt that pieces crumbled away. It bugled again, an ugly bellow of a sound.  
The hum changed, suddenly, sharpening and warped. Jay yelled, turning his face away into the dirt and throwing his arms up in a feeble attempt at protection-- fresh blood dripped off his hand onto his face.  
The unicorn charged.  
  
There was noise, ear-splitting, soul-ripping cacaphony, but nothing in focus. The world spun dizzingly.  
Then the unicorn was above him again, looking down at him with wide-set brown eyes made incandescent by its still-burning horn. Jay couldn't think for the shine. When the unicorn bent its head down Jay just kept staring.  
The spiral horn itself was only warm but when it pressed slant-wise across Jay's forehead it was like pressing on a live wire; awareness surged back into him so fast he was almost sick again. He could see, and feel, and holy _shit_ did he not want to feel right then. Everything that didn't burn hummed with pins and needles. The world resolved itself around him, more full of shadows that it'd been before.  
Jay jolted upright, instinctively scrabbling for the camera that had fallen on the grass by his feet. Grass. The house. _Shit._ Something blocked his throat and he choked, squeezing his eyes shut. _Camera. Can't reach it._ At a mumbled half-remembered word the camera floated into his hands, and he clutched it, struggling to breathe.  
The unicorn was nudging Jay over and over with its nose, split hooves dancing nervously over the overgrown grass. “Jay! Get up, we have to go, come on!”  
It's Tim's voice. He was talking strange, like his mouth was full of earth. Jay stared trying to make sense of it. He knew what Tim was-- of course he _knew--_ but it wasn't the same thing to see it. Unicorns didn't have names, why would they? Unicorns didn't favour plaid button-ups or indie bands named after alpine animals. It was strange to connect this creature around which magic crackled and sung with the mostly-sour-tempered, chain-smoking guy he'd been traveling with for months now.  
Tim nudged him again and Jay stumbled upright, keeping a deathgrip on his camera with one hand. Hesitantly he steadied himself with his other hand on the unicorn's back.  
Tim's fur rippled like he was trying to throw off an insect, but he didn't shy away. They hurry forward as much as they could with spots hurtling in front of their eyes.  
Jay turned the camera toward Tim as much as he could, curiousity surfacing even through the nausea. Tim stood about as high as Jay's shoulder. He had the sturdy shoulders of a stag and the tail of a lion that swished nervously through the air behind them. His fur was the black of a still lake on a moonless night. (Jay didn't know much about the life patterns of unicorns but he thinks that means Tim's still, relatively, fairly young.) His horn was obsidian in colour, maybe a foot long and spiralling. Without any need to fight, now, it shines with a flickering seashell light. It was bright enough Jay could see where he was stumbling, even with the sky tilting empty and dark above them.  
Tim was saying something with too many directions to make sense-- up ahead, go around. Jay just followed the line of his back under his hand. And, over and over, “Stay with me, Jay-- just stay with me.”  
  
When they're a few feet from the car Jay let go of Tim's back and teetered away to cough out bile and blood onto the dried grass. The inside of his throat burned. He narrowly avoided faceplanting into it with his hands on his knees, and his knees and his hands shaking. Before the swirling in his head could settle Tim was basically headbutting him again, ungently jostling him towards the car.  
Jay fumbled the door open and fell into the passenger seat. He struggled upright and fought with the door to close it, propping himself up against the cool glass of the closed window. Even as he took a deep inhale to try and sit up there was a _pull_ of magic behind him that he craned his head towards like a magnets drawn to metal.  
There was nothing there, except Tim's arm grabbing the blanket that'd been bunched up in the backseat for months and then slamming the door shut. A second later the driver-side door opened and Tim sat down, grimy blanket wrapped around his waist. He was carrying a shirt that he pulled on one-handed, fumbling for the ignition at the same time. “Got your seatbelt on?”  
“Wha--?”  
“Seatbelt _._ ”  
Jay did not, but he fixed that with numb fingers. He could feel his magic swirling in his blood, bright colourless sizzles in his spine and sparks flourishing up and down his eyes. Everything washed out green. His ears sung a grating, mindless pitch. He recognized what they meant; it was trying to hold something off. _Trying._ Jay was losing ground and he didn't even know what he was falling too. Reality had become patchy and fluid, some things in focus at the expense of all others: the light coming in through the windshield, Tim's breathing, the pain.  
“Jay?!”  
He returned to the car with a thump as he fell back against the passenger seat. The engine roared. “I didn'... didn't know you could do that,” he said with difficulty. “Before.”  
Tim shook his head. His hands clenched on the wheel nervously. “I can't,” he answered as he steered them the hell down the wide driveway they'd driven up to Alex's place. “Not really. It only happens when... it doesn't last very long.”  
_When what,_ Jay would've wondered a little suspiciously any other time. Now he only thought, _Least we've got the camera still._ The world faded slow from green to black around him.  
“We'll get out of here,” Tim muttered beside him. “Get somewhere safe-- you were really hacking there, you need to go back to the doctors _soon_. I know you don't like it but--”  
Jay didn't hear him. He was floating away.  
  
  
*  
  
  
**4.  
**   
Jay was gone.  
Tim couldn't help that. He was sorry it happened, but he couldn't change anything now. He wouldn't give up either. It would be an insult to Jay and the others' memory to give up. And he'd made it this far, hadn't he? He needed to finish it.  
Things must happen the way they're meant to happen. Quests can't be abandoned midway.  
So he drove down to the college with reddened eyes and his dead partner's knife in his pocket, the uneven bells of a broken clock tolling over and over in his ears.  
  
  


////

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic's first tiny incarnation was a tumblr post I wrote after re-reading the novel:  
>  _“As for the Operator, I know less than I’ve heard, for there are too many stories and one argues with another. The Operator is real, the Operator is a ghost, the Operator is Alex Kralie himself when the sun goes down. The Operator was in the woods before Alex Kralie, or it came with him, or it came to him. It protects him from attacks and saves him the expense of arming himself, or it keeps him a prisoner in his own house. It is the devil to whom Alex sold his soul. It’s the thing Alex sold his soul to possess. It belongs to Alex. Alex belongs to it.”_  
>  _“They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Operator followed close behind them and covered their footprints.”_  
>   
>  The 'much, much older' comment is because in TLU novel, Schmendrick, the magician who inspired me to write this Jay, was under a spell by his former teacher Nico, who was a great wizard in his own right. Nico had found that Schemndrick's magical ineptitude was utterally all-encompassing, so much that he must have amazing power that he simply didn't have access to yet. But Nico was sure he would, eventually. So he spelled Schmendrick to be eternally youthful until his magic grew into itself, or he grew into it, at which point the spell would break. Jay of course didn't get that chance.  
> Additional fun fact, as a unicorn Tim is also pretty eternal (unless killed).


End file.
